Gwen Webber-McLeod, standing at lectern, speaks at her 2014 "You Can't Fail" conference. Caeresa Richardson, a panelist, is seated at the table. The various divisions of Gwen Inc. influence about 1,000 leaders a year. Webber-McLeod, who earned a psychology degree from State University College at Potsdam and master's in management from Keuka College, has founded three companies.
(Courtesy of Gwen Inc. / Yesenia Garcia-Key)

Gwen Webber-McLeod is president and CEO of Gwen Inc., her seven-year-old leadership development company in Auburn.

She helps emerging and established leaders achieve goals by focusing on four competencies. She calls them the Four Cs: confidence, competence, courage and calm.

The company offers executive coaching and leadership development, consulting, events and national speaking engagements and a "You Can't Fail" division, focusing on professional women of color and those who support them.

Gwen Inc. has clients all over the United States, though most are concentrated in New York state. She has started businesses and held a variety of executive positions, including executive director of the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls in 1984.

Where you in leadership roles growing up?
My father, Lt. Col. Charles E. Webber, was career military. He came back from Vietnam in 1968, and we moved to Fort Drum. My mother is Barbara Webber. She was an Army wife and taught in the Carthage Central School District for 30 years.

There are four girls in our family. We were known as The Webber Girls.

For people who are now are friends, we were the first African-Americans they had up-close and intimate experiences with. It was an interesting experience for us as well. But we were Army brats and were used to that.

My parents grew up in the Jim Crow south. They're both graduates of North Carolina A&T, a historically black college. They made a conscious decision that when they had children they would develop them as leaders, although they might not have used that language.

I can't think of a day in my life where my parents did not absolutely have The Webber Girls convinced that we could do and be anything. They're telling us this in the 1950s and '60s, through the heart beat of the civil rights movement.

I remember waking up and having my mother one-by-one pulling us into the front seat, braiding hair and asking her: Why did we sleep in the car?

"Well, your dad just got tired and he decided to pull over to the side of the road."

When we got older, she told us why we slept in the car: "Your father would pull into hotels -- and we were always meticulously dressed -- and they wouldn't allow us to check in because we were African-American."

I was born in Germany. We came back to the United States when I was an infant and went back to Germany when I was in elementary school. He took us to walk through a concentration camp.

We were these little girls, in these little Shirley Temple coats, and outside the gate, he asked: How did that make you feel?

We said: You know, Dad, something didn't feel right about it.

He said: Exactly. So what I want to share with you is that I believe that our friends who are Jewish had a very similar history that we did in terms of being discriminated against and I want to let you girls know that you're never allowed to discriminate against people because when it's really bad this is what happens.

They groomed us to lead. We were Girl Scouts. We were in student government. My dad was the first African-American elected to the Jefferson County Legislature. When he passed away, my mom stepped into his seat and became the first Democratic woman and the first African-American woman.

What tips would you give someone moving into a leadership role?
I ask clients: How did you become a leader? Most people tell me it kind of just happened as the result of a promotion.

I say to them: Why do you think your company promoted you?

I'll synthesize what many of them say: I demonstrated that I could do the technical task in that job description. Now that I'm beginning to understand what leadership really is, no one asked me if I knew how to lead -- developing trust, sustaining a team, change management. Those kinds of things.

You need to be intentional about finding who you are as a leader, and what that means to you. Then you need to develop the specific skills that are going to allow you to be that type of leader in the workplace, both technical and relational.

It's important for people to have a mentor or an executive coach because leadership is isolating. It becomes inappropriate for you to walk around your company going, "I don't know what we're going to do."

So I encourage people to have someone that can be a soft landing for them, a place where you can go and feel authentic about what you feel insecure about, afraid about.
Fear is a factor in leadership. You just can't show that to people following you.

When people promote you to be a leader, they're expecting that you're showing up with the ability to live and operate at the strategic level. A lot of my clients when they first come to us are really operating like sophisticated managers and are completely asleep about what it means to lead.

So the tips that I give regularly: Claim your career, be intentional about it, define who you are as a leader in terms of your values and your beliefs. And then develop the whole set of skills, both technical and relational, that are going to allow you to be your authentic self as a leader all the time.

What are the skills that you think a leader needs?
Those attributes, the Four Cs, that we use in our mission statement.

When I'm talking about confidence, what I'm observing is that people have the confidence that they believe they are capable to do the work that they've been given. And then that they're equally confident about their company's mission. They're confident in the people around them. They have high trust relationships with the people that they have to inspire.

When I'm talking about competence, you need to technically know how to do your job. Clients say one of their biggest challenges now is that the skills required to run the business 20 years ago are not the same skills now. So you have to stay relevant in your industry, to know what is required to be an effective leader in your industry from a technical point of view.

And then there are skills that people frequently pooh-pooh as soft skills. Those are the skills that when combined with what you technically know make you effective.

So we talk to people about having to be trusted. You have to inspire people to trust you, extend trust to other people and then restore trust wherever you see it broken. You have to be in the business of leading people through change and managing change fatigue.

We believe that people have to be courageous, able to articulate their visions and have the skill to say who you are and what you believe about yourself as a leader.

When we're talking about courage, I think these are the times that are trying leaders' souls. There's a tsunami of change. People are doing more with less. It really requires courage to lead in this environment, to deliver that tough news.

Unspokens are dangerous. So many organizations are struggling because everybody knows the deal, but nobody wants to talk about the deal.

When we're talking about calm, it is that idea that as leaders we absorb all of the chaos and are required to push out calm.

What's needed to spark innovation in a company?
Lob problems into the entire organization. CEOs let top-level leaders get stuck using only those people closest to them to problem-solve. The person who really might have the answer is the janitor. Hierarchically, CEOs wouldn't have access to someone on a maintenance team and don't even think to engage other brainpower.

One of the keys to sparking innovation is to truly believe that none of us is smarter than all of us; that philosophy is at the root of innovation.

Once you learn how to innovate, the thing that drives the most successful innovations is people understanding how to build the relationships with people to get the work done around that.

Can leadership be taught?
Yes.

How can you teach it?
If I'm in a Head Start classroom I see little people that manifest those four Cs in an age appropriate way. So I think some people have innate abilities.

In my business, what we do is leadership education. The way that we go about teaching it is, first of all, to wake people up that when you have a certain type of job title, not only are you expected to get the technical stuff done, but people are expecting you to have the ability to get people to follow you.

It's almost stunning to people when I say that. People are asleep about the fact that there is an expectation that they are supposed to lead. They have a job title, so what's causing them to call us a lot of times is this tension because they're there every day, technically doing the work. They're creating the budget and managing it. They're deploying the vehicles where the vehicles need to go.

They can't drive certain results, and that's the work of leadership. That's different than managing those technical things.

Most people who are expected to lead, think that when they're managing, they're leading. It's not the same thing.

So we wake them up about this other thing.

They need to understand that trust is a strategic business resource and they need to figure out how to build it and extend it.

Every leader, no matter where they lead, needs to understand they need to make effective decisions and know how to execute them.

So we talk to them about the psychological and emotional impact of change on people in the workforce, because that's really what we have to lead through.

Tell me about You Can't Fail.
We're creating a safe space for women of color and women -- it's a strategically designed multicultural learning environment, not only to talk about that, but to talk about what that means when you are a black or brown woman and leading an organization dealing with the factors of unexpectedness to boot.

Describe unexpectedness.
Unexpected leaders are those individuals that every once in a while will burst on the scene. No one's seen them coming. They get the promotion. President Obama is an unexpected leader. He's the classic example.

Suddenly the company decides to promote you. There's never been a leader inside the company like you before. Right? You're the first and the only. And when you show up, people are like "Whoa! Where'd they come from?"

So that is the beginning of the whole unexpected thing. People don't expect it to be you. Once you get there, it's always a celebration. We see these historical moments all the time. The first woman. The first person from this city. It comes along with some other stuff that's often frankly not spoken in the workplace. So being the first and the only is celebratory. But it comes with a lot of tension, because you're isolated. There is no one else like you at the top.

A factor of unexpectedness is people are suspicious of your leadership. You struggle gaining and sustaining credibility, because they've never been led by anyone like you. They don't expect it to be you.

The other factor that comes into play then is that you do have this tension around paying your success forward. Because you are highly aware that whether another unexpected follows you, is dependent upon perceptions of whether you were successful.

So when we're talking about the unexpected leader, traditionally they've been women, people of color and age. I was a young leader. So it can be age. It can be geography.

Some company's unexpectedness is triggered by communication style. A woman who works for me now was a vice president in a huge international company. If you saw her, it would be very difficult to read her. In some companies, promoting that leadership style to the top is not what leadership looks like.

So when we're dealing with unexpectedness we're supporting a leader that finds themselves in that situation.

Imagine if Barack Obama was walking around going, "You know. It's not easy being the first black president of the United States." He never says it. But we all know it. Right?

That same thing happens to people in the workforce. If we use race as the unexpected factor, it's an honor to become the first African-American such and such.

I'm really moving my company more and more in this direction. We specialize in this now, but we're going to elevate the fact that we do. To support that particular type of leader as well.

"CNY Conversations" feature Q&A interviews with local citizens about leadership, success, and innovation. The conversations are condensed and edited. They also run regularly on Sunday in The Post-Standard's Business section. To suggest a person for CNY Conversations, contact Stan Linhorst at slinhorst@syracuse.com.